Liberal democrats

For Lib Dem modernisers there are few more depressing sights than how conference reacts to a Tim Farron speech: he serves up social democratic red meat and they absolutely lap it up. Farron, the party president, delivered one anti-Tory jibe after another. He declared that the government would be an ‘absolute nightmare without’ the Liberal Democrats in it, boasted that Nick Clegg was ‘leading the opposition’ as well as being deputy Prime Minister and accused the Tories of believing it was ok for the super-rich not to pay tax. There were also a slew of attacks on ‘the reactionary Tory drivel’ that the Tories have supposedly sprouted since the riots.

Sandals are being rattled in Birmingham this morning. The Liberal Democrat conference opens to a chorus celebrating the party’s achievements in government. Nick Clegg tells the Independent that “Liberal Democrat fingerprints” are all over flagship coalition policies on schools, welfare, pensions, banking reform and the NHS reforms. He says of the latter that the Liberal Democrats have tempered the Conservatives. Clegg will reiterate this point at a rally later this afternoon. Despite news that the Liberals seek an electoral accommodation with the Conservatives, senior party figures are at pains to accentuate their differences with the Tories. Danny Alexander informs the Financial Times that he views the new backbench Tory Eurosceptic

The Institute for Fiscal Studies enjoys quasi-divine status in Westminster: chancellors and their shadows bother it for its blessing, and Budget Day is never complete until its judgment has been passed. Both parties have bent a suppliant knee before the institute in the past, but the IFS became particularly important to Labour after it declared last autumn that George Osborne’s policies to be ‘regressive‘. This is why the IFS report on the tax system, released today, is important. The review, conducted by Sir James Mirrlees, is a damning indictment on tax system that has fallen from 5th to 95th in the World Economic Forum’s tax competitiveness rankings. Mirrlees’ findings have far

It’s the moment of the truth for Britain’s banking sector: the publication of the Vickers report. The headline is as expected: the Commission recommends the imposition of a ringfence on banks’ ‘core operations’ (such as consumer deposits and small business lending) from the riskier elements of their business. According to the FT (£), the banks will have discretion over where the ringfence will fall, giving lenders and users a degree of flexibility, which suggests that Vickers is not recommending the full separation of retail and investment banking, as some had hoped. Vickers also proposes that banks reserve 10 per cent of the capital in their ringfenced operations to guard against future crises, which is expected to

How long will Alex Salmond’s honeymoon with the voters of Scotland continue? Given that his next mission is to hold and win an independence referendum, much depends on his popularity and that of his party. Today, a third opinion poll puts support for the Scottish National Party at just under half of the national electorate. Angus Reid, polling for the Sunday Express, puts support for the SNP has now hit a remarkable 49 per cent. Given that the Nationalists only won 45 per cent of the votes in May’s election – enough to sweep all the unionist parties into the background – this new high just shy of 50 per

William Hague’s comments in an interview with The Times that the Liberal Democrats are restraining the Tories on Europe will increase the grumbling among Tory backbenchers about the power of the junior coalition partner. Hague tells the paper that ‘A point of difference in our manifesto was the aim to repatriate some powers. Clearly that’s something I’m in favour of, but that’s the area we had to compromise on in return for other compromises.’ (In many ways this is a statement of the obvious. But in the current uncertain European environment, his remarks are news). In an attempt to reassure euro-sceptics, Foreign Secretary stresses that the Conservative party ‘would like

I understand that following a meeting in Downing Street this morning, Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, has been put in charge of dealing with Britain’s 120,000 “problem families”. In the aftermath of the riots, David Cameron promised to put all of these families through some a family-intervention programme by the time of the next election. This policy, though, was bogged down in the bureaucracy as it cut across so many different departments. Pickles’ department will now have sole responsibility for this commitment. It will receive extra budget, with the money coming from education and work and pensions, and staff to deal with this. As I revealed in